There are many ways in which to age and many words to describe the process. But to say that Alan Barcus is aging gracefully-a good word with which most of us would be happy-doesn’t come close to capturing the vibrancy of this 70-year-old’s life.
Looking 20 years younger than the calendar would have it, Barcus has just released his second album, a wonderfully eclectic package titled “Don’t I Know.” He did so with an October party at the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks, Mich., where Osgood captured him at the piano during another gig in December. “About time for my second album. Thirty years between releases,” he says, flashing the area’s most self-effacing smile.
Barcus attended Indiana State University, where he was a star athlete and received a master’s degree in business. He started a jazz trio and coached sports for a time and then, with wife, Ann, and young daughter, Katie, and no job, came to Chicago in the late 1960s. He soon was leading the orchestra at the Playboy Club and was musical director of the play “Hair,” where he met and formed a lifelong friendship with a young Chicago actor named Joe Mantegna.
In the early 1970s, he and Mantegna wrote a musical. Mantegna went off to become a movie star and Barcus became a prolific and successful composer, lyricist, arranger, songwriter, playwright and pianist. He has composed for film. His songs have been performed by such artists as Peggy Lee.
Go to Cubs games? You have heard his “You’re My Cubs,” the official team fight song.
Watch TV or listen to radio? Then you have heard some of his more than 2,400 commercials, for such big clients as McDonalds, United Airlines, Kellogg’s and Pepsi. That is his voice, singing his words on the can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head jingle for Car-X: “Rattle rattle, thunder clatter, boom, boom, boom . . . . “
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In addition to his artistic accomplishments, he is one of the greatest gray-haired basketball players in the world. He played for the Chicago Masters Basketball team, national champions in 2001, 2002, and 2004, and was twice MVP. In the International Games, he was a member of the gold-medal Team USA in Helsinki in 1998 and again in 2006 in Hamburg.
On the new CD he sings most of the songs, which include the work of such talented musical friends as Dick Noel, Orville Stoeber, Matt Burden, Leah Banicki and Gary Pigg.
One song is titled “It Ain’t Easy Gettin’ Old” and it contains these words: “One time when you were hot, you said, ‘What happens when you’re not?’ “
That is not a question Barcus will likely have to answer for some time, if ever.
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